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On November 30, 1916, an apparently ordinary freighter left harbor in Kiel, Germany, and would not touch land again for another fifteen months. It was the beginning of an astounding 64,000-mile voyage that was to take the ship around the world, leaving a trail of destruction and devastation in her wake. For this was no ordinary freighter—this was the Wolf, a disguised German warship. In this gripping account of an audacious and lethal World War I expedition, Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen depict the Wolf ’s assignment: to terrorize distant ports of the British Empire by laying minefields and sinking freighters, thus hastening Germany’s goal of starving her enemy into submission. Yet to maintain secrecy, she could never pull into port or use her radio, and to comply with the rules of sea warfare, her captain fastidiously tried to avoid killing civilians aboard the merchant ships he attacked, taking their crews and passengers prisoner before sinking the vessels. The Wolf thus became a huge floating prison, with more than 400 captives, including a number of women and children, from twenty-five different nations. Sexual affairs were kindled between the German crew and some female prisoners. A six-year-old American girl, captured while sailing across the Pacific with her parents, was adopted as a mascot by the Germans. Forced to survive on food and fuel plundered from other ships, facing death from scurvy, and hunted by the combined navies of five Allied nations, the Germans and their prisoners came to share a common bond. The will to survive transcended enmities of race, class, and nationality. It was to be one of the most daring clandestine naval missions of modern times. Under the command of Captain Karl Nerger, who conducted his deadly business with an admirable sense of chivalry, the Wolf traversed three of the world’s major oceans and destroyed more than thirty Allied vessels. We learn of the world through which the Wolf moved, with all its social divisions and xenophobia, its bravery and stoicism, its combination of old-world social mores and rapid technological change. The story of this epic voyage is a vivid real-life narrative and simultaneously a richly detailed picture of a world being profoundly transformed by war.
The untold and full story of German warships and auxiliary cruisers in the Pacific Ocean during the First World WarCombines the views of the British, German, French and Canadian commanders for the first timeLavishly illustrated with many unpublished images: of interest to the military historian and modeller alike As the world plunged into war in August 1914, two German fleets and several cruisers lay beyond the North Sea, posing a serious threat to British merchant vessels and naval superiority. Beyond the British blockade, there was little chance of reinforcements and resupply of ammunition. Admiral Souchon crossed the Mediterranean with a superior French and British fleet in pursuit. Vice-Admiral von Spee had to decide what to do half a world away from Germany with colonies and friendly shipping rapidly being overtaken by Allied forces. With only the ammunition onboard his vessels, he had to fight his way through British lines to get his men home. Karl von Müller led the Emden on a daring campaign of commerce raiding as did the commander of the Karlsruhe. Other cruisers also carried out warfare, seriously affecting Allied merchant shipping. However, the Royal Navy spent precious resources to remove these threats and Admiral Craddock swept down the coast of North America chasing phantoms only to find what he was looking for was at Coronel and the Falklands Islands.
This is the story of Germany's commerce raiders of World War I, the surface ships that were supposed to starve the British Isles of the vast cargoes of vital resources being shipped from the furthest reaches of the Empire. To that end pre-war German naval strategists allocated a number of cruisers and armed, fast ocean liners, as well as a complex and globe-spanning supply network to support them – known as the Etappe network. This book, drawing on technical illustrations and the author's exhaustive research, explains the often overlooked role that the commerce raiders played in World War I. Whilst exploring the design and development of the ships, it also describes their operational history, how they tied up a disproportionate amount of the British fleet on lengthy pursuits, and how certain raiders such as the SMS Emden were able to wreak havoc across the oceans.
A British naval historian recounts the victories and defeats of two of the most infamous German Navy vessels during World War II. Bernard Edwards’s Beware Raiders! tells the fascinating story of two German ships and the havoc they caused amongst Allied shipping in World War II. One was the eight-inch gun cruiser Admiral Hipper—named for World War I’s German fleet Admiral Franz von Hipper—fast, powerful, and Navy-manned. The other was a converted merchant man, Hansa Line’s Kandelfels armed with a few old scavenged guns manned largely by reservists, and sailing under the nom de guerre Pinguin. The difference between the pride of the Third Reich’s Kriegsmarine’s fleet and the converted cruiser was even more evident in their commanders. Edwards emphasizes the striking contrast between the conduct of Ernst Kruder, captain of the Pinguin, who attempted to cause as little loss of life as possible, and the callous Iron Cross–decorated Wilhelm Meisel of the Admiral Hipper, who had scant regard for the lives of the men whose ships he had sunk. Contrary to all expectations, as Edwards reveals in his thrilling accounts of the missions performed by each ship, the amateur man-of-war reaped a rich harvest and went out in a blaze of glory. The purpose-built battlecruiser, on the other hand, was hard-pressed even to make her mark on the war and ended her days in ignominy.
There have been a number of studies published on the activities of British and German navies during World War I, but little on naval action in other arenas. This book offers for the first time a balanced history of the naval war as a whole, viewed from the perspective of all participants in all major theaters. The author's earlier examination The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918, centered on submarine activities and allied efforts to counteract this new menace. With this welcome sequel he again takes the reader beyond those World War I operations staged on the North Sea. Halpern's clear and authoritative voice lends a cohesiveness to this encompassing view of the Italians and Austrians in the Adriatic; the Russians, Germans, and Turks in the Baltic and Black Seas; and French and British in the Mediterranean. Important riverine engagements--notably on the Danube--also are included, along with major colonial campaigns such as Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles. The role of neutral sea powers, such as the Swedes in the Baltic and the Dutch in the East Indies, is examined from the perspective of how their neutrality affected naval activity. Also discussed is the part played by the U.S. Navy and the often overlooked, but far from negligible, role of the Japanese navy. The latter is viewed in the context of the opening months of the war and in the Mediterranean during the height of the submarine crisis of 1917.
This WWI naval history vividly tells the story of the Royal Navy’s Northern Blockade and the battles at sea that brought Germany to its knees. At the outbreak of World War I, Britain established a naval blockade that greatly diminished Germany’s access to trade and vital resources. The Northern Blockade brought the German economy to its knees and greatly diminished home front morale. Patrolling the inhospitable waters between Iceland and Scotland, the 10th Cruiser Squadron played a vital role in winning the war on the Western Front. At the same time, the Royal Navy successfully countered Germany’s attacks on British commerce, preventing much suffering in Britain. Drawing on numerous first-hand accounts, Historian Steve Dunn vividly chronicles this long-running battle at sea. Beginning with the blockade’s initial formation, he recounts the changes in strategy on both sides, including the use of converted liners and armed merchant vessels as warships. He also vividly describes the final destruction of German surface vessel commerce warfare, culminating in the hard-fought battle between the raider SMS Leopard and two British warships.
The Kaiser's Pirates graphically relates the story of the war against commerce carried out by the German surface raiders in 1914-17. In the period before submarine warfare became pre-eminent - and the wireless telegraph reduced a surface ship's ability to hide - the Imperial German navy employed a selection of men-of-war and merchantmen in an attempt to disrupt the maritime trade on which the British economy depended. Accompanied by a detailed alphabetical listing of the many victims, the book traces the exploits of the cruisers and the merchant-raiders, supported by first-hand testimony from victors and victims alike.
In 1918 a few daring low-ranking Australian infantrymen, alone among all the armies on the Western Front, initiated stealth raids without orders. These stealth raiders killed Germans, captured prisoners and advanced the line, sometimes by thousands of yards. They were held in high regard by other men of the lower ranks and were feared by the Germans facing them. Who were these stealth raiders and why did they do it? What made Australian soldiers take on this independent and personal type of warfare? Using their firsthand accounts, as well as official archives and private records, Lucas Jordan pieces their stories together. A gripping account of the crucial summer on the Western Front, Stealth Raiders: A Few Daring Men in 1918 considers the stealth raiders’ war experience and training, the unprecedented conditions at the front and the morale of the German Army in 1918. Lucas Jordan argues that bush skills, and the bush ethos central to Australian civil society – with its emphasis on resourcefulness and initiative – made stealth raids a distinctively Australian phenomenon. ‘Depressingly often we see books promoted as “the forgotten story” or “the untold story”. Yet Stealth Raiders tells such a story, of a few daring Australian infantry who . . . so demoralised their opponents that they feared to enter the line against them’ – Bill Gammage